Age of Anger

by Pankaj Mishra

  * * *

  The crony-capitalist regimes of Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand and Vladimir Putin in Russia were inaugurated by ferocious offensives against ethnic minorities. Erdogan is trying to consolidate support by renewing attacks on the Kurds, among other ‘traitors’. Even in the United States, a figure like Trump became a presidential candidate with the help of repeated threats to Mexicans and Muslims. All these figures trying feverishly to define a national community today actually attest to a decline of the historical form of the nation state. The social contract has weakened everywhere under the pressure of globalization. Much ultra-nationalist rhetoric verifies that the political entity entrusted universally since the French Revolution with the exercise of sovereign power is increasingly unable to resolve internal conflicts over distribution or to effect compromises between ethnic and racial communities.

  This crisis of a flailing universal – the nation state – is signalled most clearly by the upsurge of particularist identities in even Europe and America. The black man called Barack Obama once wrote of the ‘trap’ of American life for victims of discrimination like himself; he wrote of being forced to withdraw ‘into a smaller and smaller coil of rage’, into ‘the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat’, and then inviting, ‘should you refuse this defeat and lash out’, the epithets ‘Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger.’ Young members of racial and ethnic minorities, who awakened politically through the internet during the great economic crisis, try to protect their threatened dignity by insisting on being recognized as different. Conscious of a global audience, they also demand redress, if not reparations, from reigning white elites for racial injuries inflicted on their ancestors. In 2016 a spate of recorded killings by police of unarmed African-Americans provoked even some of the most wealthy musicians and athletes in the United States (Beyoncé, Serena Williams) into a politics of defiant gestures that was last witnessed in the 1970s.

  At the same time, many elites in post-Enlightenment democracies try to resurrect their romantic national myths: the French presidential candidate (and former president) Nicolas Sarkozy wants all immigrants in France to acknowledge the Gauls as their ancestors. The British prime minister, Theresa May, warns that ‘if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere’. Politicians can find no rational ground to deny the political and moral claims of minorities or the economic benefits of immigration. It is easier to retreat, as England’s Brexit campaign showed, into fantasies of past power and glory, and splendid isolation; and there are enough vendors of a clash of civilizations peddling magical cosmic solutions to neuroses whose source lies in profound inequalities at home. These included the chief advocate of the clash of civilizations theory. Samuel Huntington fretted in his last book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004), about the destruction of white American culture by Hispanic immigration – a theme taken up vigorously by Donald Trump promising to make America great again.

  Thus, in the very places where secular modernity arose, with ideas that were then universally established – individualism (against the significance of social relations), the cult of efficiency and utility (against the ethic of honour), and the normalization of self-interest – the mythic Volk has reappeared as a spur to solidarity and action against real and imagined enemies.

  But nationalism is, more than ever before, a mystification, if not a dangerous fraud with its promise of making a country ‘great again’ and its demonization of the ‘other’; it conceals the real conditions of existence, and the true origins of suffering, even as it seeks to replicate the comforting balm of transcendental ideals within a bleak earthly horizon. Its political resurgence shows that ressentiment – in this case, of people who feel left behind by the globalized economy or contemptuously ignored by its slick overlords and cheerleaders in politics, business and the media – remains the default metaphysics of the modern world since Rousseau first defined it. And its most menacing expression in the age of individualism may well be the violent anarchism of the disinherited and the superfluous.

  6. Finding True Freedom and Equality: The Heritage of Nihilism

  It is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist. It is true to say that the glory of man is his capacity for salvation; it is also true that his glory is his capacity for damnation. The worst that can be said of most of our malefactors, from statesmen to thieves, is that they are not men enough to be damned.

  T. S. Eliot (1930)

  The Lone Wolf and His Pack

  On the morning of 19 April 1995, Timothy McVeigh drove a Ryder rental truck to the front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. He had already lit two fuses, of five and two minutes each. Leaving the truck just below a day-care centre in the building he walked away as a large explosion behind him destroyed the north half of the building, killing 168 people, including 19 children, and injuring 684 others.

  It was the first large-scale attack by a ‘domestic’ terrorist in the United States. The list has radically expanded in recent years, but Oklahoma still dwarfs, in its malignity and scale, the killings at the Boston Marathon, Charleston, Chattanooga, Austin, Fort Hood, San Bernadino and Orlando.

  Muslim terrorists were initially suspected of carrying out the attack on the federal building. A Kuwaiti-Pakistani man called Ramzi Ahmed Yousef had bombed the World Trade Center just two years previously. There was some surprise when McVeigh, a veteran of the First Gulf War, was arrested and charged with mass murder. Bewildered friends and relatives filled in his unremarkable middle-class suburban background. The son of divorced parents, and a devotee of Chuck Norris and Rambo movies, McVeigh seemed to be the victim of a fantasy of what Barack Obama in his memoir called ‘swaggering American manhood’. McVeigh’s reported opinions also made him seem a classic victim of white male ressentiment in a world where long-suppressed minorities look assertive.

  He had railed against feminism: ‘In the past thirty years, because of the women’s movement, they’ve taken an influence out of the household.’ Political correctness had pampered African-Americans – or, ‘niggers’, as he called them. The National Rifle Association (NRA) was too weak to preserve the Second Amendment. The United Nations together with the government of the United States was taking over the world. Amassing guns, McVeigh had seen himself as a noble survivalist. But, as with all people we have examined so far, McVeigh’s identity exceeds his social background or any psychological classification. A simple picture of his motivations is immediately muddied by his contradictory views, many of which disturbingly converge with mainstream opinion.

  * * *

  McVeigh’s prosecutors depicted him as a lone and psychotic killer with no known connections to terrorist groups. It is a charge commonly brought against white perpetrators of mass violence in the United States, though quite a lot of slaughter is avowedly ideological and targeted at symbols of political power. (Jared Loughner, who murdered six people during a failed assassination attempt on Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford in 2011, claimed to be on a crusade against ‘federalist laws’, while Dylann Roof, who in 2015 killed nine people at a church in South Carolina attended mostly by African-Americans, said he had hoped to incite a race war.)

  The accusation did not quite fit McVeigh, who had drifted through various loose networks of white men linked by their extreme hatred and suspicion of the federal government. During his trial and afterwards, he produced a laundry list of their grievances: the FBI raid on Waco, Texas, US military actions against smaller nations, no-knock search warrants, high taxation and gun-control laws.

  McVeigh also presented himself as a besieged defender of the American Constitution. He placed himself in the tradition of the small band of patriots who wished to defend liberty and freedom from government oppression and took on the British army at Lexington and Concord on 19 April 1775. He equated the tax-happy US federal government with the oppressive British government of pre-revolutionary America. He
quoted Thomas Jefferson on liberty, and he copied out and left a quotation from John Locke in his getaway car: ‘I have no reason to suppose that he who would take away my liberty, would not, when he had me in his power, take away everything else. Therefore, it is lawful for me to treat him as one who has put himself into a “state of war” against me, and kill him if I can.’

  Yet McVeigh was a ‘lone wolf’ in a more unnerving and revealing sense than the judicial definition of his pre-meditated killings conveyed. His getaway car had no registration plates; he seemed eager to be caught; and he surrendered easily. He showed no remorse over his act of mass murder. He appeared to have in his soul what Madame de Staël saw in the mass murderer of her own time: ‘a cold sharp-edged sword, which froze the wound that it inflicted’.

  In his lack of emotional ties, and indifference to his fate, McVeigh appeared the archetype of the violent agitator defined in the first pages of the pamphlet ‘The Catechism of a Revolutionary’ that, apparently co-authored by Bakunin, has entranced many radicals since 1869. The affectless McVeigh seemed like the man who ‘has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property’ and who ‘has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose – to destroy it.’

  Like this nineteenth-century idealist murderer and loner, McVeigh turned out to possess an extended analysis of political and social repression – one that would seem persuasive to individuals on both the left and the right today. He had written as early as 1992 that:

  the ‘American Dream’ of the middle class has all but disappeared, substituted with people struggling just to buy next week’s groceries. Heaven forbid the car breaks down. Politicians are further eroding the ‘American Dream’ by passing laws which are supposed to be a ‘quick fix’, when all they are really designed for is to get the official re-elected.

  McVeigh spoke presciently of a middle class that, its wages stagnant, was sliding into the wrong side of a new social division appearing in America and across the world: the moneyed elite and the rest. Already in the 1970s rising extreme-right groups, the Minutemen, the American Nazi Party, the Aryan Nations, a revived Ku Klux Klan, and radical left organizations like the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army had manifested a loss of confidence in the American Dream.

  Recoiling from the Crystal Palace of modernity, McVeigh came to seek an old American idea of autonomy and self-sufficiency. He spent much of his adult life fantasizing, just as Bakunin, who passed through the United States, once had, about being ‘in the American woods, where civilization is only about to blossom forth, where life is still an incessant struggle against wild men and against a wild nature, not in a well-ordered bourgeois society’.

  Searching for Humanity

  McVeigh is still not easily stereotyped as a white supremacist dreaming of an American past of unlimited freedom (or as a Christian fundamentalist: his religion, he claimed, was ‘science’). Claiming in a letter to a local newspaper in 1992 that democracy may be following Communism down the road to perdition, he startlingly lapsed into praise for the egalitarianism of America’s steadfast ideological foe:

  Maybe we have to combine ideologies to achieve the perfect utopian government. Remember, government-sponsored health care was a communist idea. Should only the rich be allowed to live longer? Does that say that because a person is poor he is a lesser human being and doesn’t deserve to live as long, because he doesn’t wear a tie to work?

  All his white-bread racism didn’t prevent McVeigh from developing, while serving abroad, compassion for those he had been trained to dehumanize and kill. He participated in the general ‘turkey-shoot’ by US-led Coalition forces in 1990 against Saddam Hussein’s bedraggled troops. He himself ended up murdering two Iraqis in cold blood during a globally televised war remarkable for its apparent absence of blood. Facing the death sentence, McVeigh would later remark on the irony of once having ‘got medals for killing people’. He also confessed to a deep unease over the fact that:

  I didn’t kill them in self-defense … When I took a human life, it taught me these were human beings, even though they speak a different language and have different customs. The truth is, we all have the same dreams, the same desires, the same care for our children and our family. These people were humans, like me, at the core.

  McVeigh’s proclamation of a common humanity now seems radical. For during the years since 9/11, war ceased to be the continuation of politics by other means; it took on a theological intensity, aiming at the extirpation of what Chris Kyle in American Sniper, a sniper’s personal account of the American war in Iraq, calls ‘savage, desperate evil’. ‘I wanted everyone to know I was a Christian,’ Kyle wrote, explaining his red Crusader-cross tattoo in his chronicle of exterminating the brutes.

  The xenophobic frenzy unleashed by Clint Eastwood’s film of Kyle’s book suggested the most vehement partisans of holy war flourish not only in the ravaged landscapes of South and West Asia. Such fanatics, who can be atheists as well as crusaders and jihadists, also lurk among America’s best and brightest, emboldened by an endless supply of money, arms, and even ‘ideas’ supplied by terrorism experts and clash-of-civilizations theorists.

  For McVeigh, however, the First Gulf War seems to have been as crucial in turning him against the American government as it was for Osama bin Laden. In fact, the impersonal, nearly abstract massacre of more than a hundred thousand Iraqis in 1990 determined his own murderous intent. As his biographers described McVeigh’s act of mimetic violence:

  He needed to deliver a quantity of casualties the federal government would never forget. It was the same tactic the American government used in armed international conflicts, when it wanted to send a message to tyrants and despots. It was the United States government that had ushered in this new anything-goes mentality, McVeigh believed, and he intended to show the world what it would be like to fight a war under these new rules, right in the federal government’s own backyard.

  Claiming that he did not know of the presence of children in the federal building, McVeigh accused the US government of bombing Iraqi targets in full awareness of the proximity of children:

  The administration has admitted to knowledge of the presence of children in or near Iraqi government buildings, yet they still proceed with their plans to bomb – saying that they cannot be held responsible if children die … When considering morality and ‘mens rea’ (criminal intent) in light of these facts, I ask: Who are the true barbarians?

  Émile Henry, the bourgeois anarchist who bombed a café near the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris in 1894, killing one person and wounding twenty, also protested that his accusers had no right to charge him for murdering innocent people:

  Are they not innocent victims, these children, who in the faubourgs slowly die of anemia, because bread is rare at home; these women who in your workshops suffer exhaustion and are worn out in order to earn forty cents a day, happy that misery has not yet forced them into prostitution; these old men whom you have turned into machines so that they can produce their entire lives and whom you throw out into the street when they have been completely depleted.

  Many over-educated terrorists have made similar claims against the ‘system’. Theodor Herzl, who witnessed a notorious criminal-turned-anarchist called Ravachol on trial in Paris in 1892, concluded that ‘he believes in himself and in his mission. He has become honest in his crimes. The ordinary murderer rushes into the brothel with his loot. Ravachol has discovered another voluptuousness: the voluptuousness of a great idea and of martyrdom.’

  In seeing himself as a saviour of humanity from arrogant and brutal government, McVeigh has many more surprising precedents than Baader-Meinhof and the Weathermen. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first man to call himself an anarchist, declared in Confessions of a Revolutionary (1849): ‘Whoever lays a hand on me to
govern me is a usurper and a tyrant. I declare him to be my enemy.’ Proudhon, appalled by public support of imperial despotism and militarist adventurism in France, came to believe that:

  To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, hoaxed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sold, betrayed, and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

  It is also true that McVeigh’s arguments against the state are by no means unfamiliar or exotic today. In America, it was never a sign of extremism to believe that the government is the greatest enemy of individual freedom. Several generations of conservative politicians have asserted the same, and have been hailed for their wisdom. Today, left-leaning admirers of Edward Snowden and critics of the National Security Agency (NSA) and Guantanamo believe this to be true as much as the NRA, white militias and survivalist groups. The libertarian Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel blames big government on the enfranchisement of women, and he issues such grandiloquent Nietzscheanisms as ‘The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.’